“Yes. Great. They’ll be here any minute now, no matter how quiet we are,” she said.
“And what would you tell me?” Dawn asked, shaking off any shivers about the arrival of the nurses. Is this an asylum? she wondered, though she knew better than to handle more than one mystery at a time.
“What?”
“Your name,” Dawn explained.
“Morgan,” the woman told her. Dawn’s forehead scrunched, as if with a will of its own.
“I…don’t like you very much, do I?” asked Dawn. A bark of laughter escaped Morgan before she answered.
“I would imagine not. I’m the one who brought you here,” she told Dawn.
“Wha- why?” Dawn stammered. Her knuckles crackled as they tightened into a sore fist. It was that pain of recent use that stopped Dawn from giving in to the urge to abuse rock. Memory or not, she wasn’t one to repeat the same mistake twice.
“I tried to use your brain as a bargaining chip to involve myself in a certain…program. Should have known better than to try and manipulate that bastard. He… She… Whatever it is now, always finds a way to come out on top,” Morgan told her. Dawn stifled the urge to scream when the distant tap of footsteps tickled the inside of her ear.
“What do you mean, you used my brain? Is that why I don’t remember anything?” Dawn demanded.
“No- I turned you over for interrogation. About the outlaw, Drogan. About what happened on Mukurus. You gave it all up, no problem. The memory loss is a side effect of our…treatment,” Morgan did her best to explain with what little time they had. The footsteps stomped louder each second.
“Our? I thought you turned me in?” Dawn struggled to wrap her mind around what she was being told.
“And I was fool enough to think he’d let me come and go as I pleased,” Morgan laughed at her own apparent stupidity, “We both know things he doesn’t want going around. Being captive members of this…research was a perfect arrangement for him.”
“I don’t know anything!” Dawn screamed when she heard the steps stop outside her door.
“You just don’t remember,” Morgan amended. “Try asking him. You told him everything.”
“Who?” Dawn shrieked. The iron door swung in, slamming over the rock where Dawn had left an imprint of her head. Morgan fell silent. Three silhouettes stepped through a dull light into the room with her. Long white coattails billowed behind two women with long teal gloves on. The man between them bore a sleek suit jacket. Beneath were a dark, solid purple dress shirt and a checkered violet tie. His lips curled into a smile as he spoke.
“Do you know who I am?” he asked.
“If you thought I did, would you ask?” Dawn countered. One of the long-coated nurses moved in immediately. Between two fingers, she pinched a long-needled syringe. The man in the suit stopped her from going closer with a gentle hand. He took the lead, stepping within a foot of Dawn’s cot. She flattened against the wall to put the comfort of distance between them.
“Amazing… You’re virtually the same, with or without any memories,” the man marveled. He reached into his jacket for something. Dawn tensed up immediately, ready to strike. The man moved in, lashing something from his pocket. Dawn launched a kick, which he easily sidestepped. The man bent to offer his hand and a napkin from inside his jacket. “Marcus Brass. I’m here to help you.” Dawn glared at the napkin for a few hostile seconds, then ripped it away from Marcus.
“Why don’t I remember anything?” Dawn demanded while she dabbed the blood away from the gash on her forehead. Marcus made his cautious way over beside her. “May I?” he asked, motioning for an empty spot on the cot. At Dawn’s uneasy nod, Marcus even turned his back to plop down beside her.
“I suspect it’s a side effect of your treatment,” he said, “You’ve been having periodic fits of acute amnesia since you entered the most recent stage. Only in withdrawal from your injections-”
“Treatment?” Dawn echoed.
“When you
came to us, you were oxygen deprived and starving from spending too long in an auxiliary pod. There was…significant damage to your brain and lungs. The only chance we had at saving you was to incorporate you into a test program for a new medicine,” Marcus explained.
“The only chance? Hah! I don’t even care about Dawn and I can’t listen to your bullshit!” Morgan’s voice roared in laughter through the cracks in the wall. Marcus cocked his head to one of the nurses. In the eerie light from the terradome outside, Dawn thought she caught a glimpse of a seam along the ridge of his jawbone. It looked almost like his face was a mask.
“I think Morgan is due for her own treatment,” he said to her. The nurse turned on her heel and left to deal with the cackling old woman immediately. Dawn balled up her fist, instantly on edge at how quickly Morgan was stifled. Marcus reached into his pocket again. Dawn lunged for him, only to be frozen mid-strike. A chill spread through her blood from the stinging spot where the other nurse had stuck a needle in her neck. The injection stole muscle function from everywhere but her lips.
“What… What do the injections do?” Dawn asked when she realized she could still speak.
“That one calms you down,” Marcus told her. When his hand slid out from inside his suit, he had a syringe of his own. This one was thick steel, with a stripe of glass down the middle to monitor what was inside. Dawn’s eyes couldn’t widen, with her eyelids immobilized, though they belied her fear nonetheless. She watched a formless black tar, something between gas and liquid, swirl inside the syringe. “This is the one that helps.”
“What…is it?” Dawn shuddered. Marcus leaned her forward with a hand on her shoulder. The nurse lifted the back of Dawn’s shirt and applied a cold swipe of alcohol. Dawn’s insides shuddered as a quarter-inch thick spike of steel pierced the bottom of her spine. She growled and whimpered while Marcus injected her nervous system with formless darkness.
“Dear Ms. Redding…I’m hoping, at the end of this, you’ll be able to tell us. The only way out of this treatment for you, I’m afraid, is through it,” Marcus told her. There was something almost like sympathy in his voice.